suicidal ideation Archives

depression, Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts, Writing & The Body

A Tale of 19 Wet Towels or How I Failed to Shed My Skin

March 23, 2017

By Ella Wilson.

1. Birth

Every time in my life that I have had the opportunity – that is to say I have been in the presence of a huge coming or going or leaving or starting, a massive adding on or taking away – every time I have had the chance to step out, to leave behind, to shed, to transform, to butterfly, to snake – every time I could have showered off the detritus of some time in my life that lay heavy on my skin. Every time I could have grown, instead I wet-toweled.

2. Starting school

Here is how you wet-towel. You take the thing you might have stepped out of, a skin, a time, a loss, a tiny pair of pants, a hit in the face. You take that thing and you wrap yourself in it.

3. Suicide attempt age 12

You shiver at first because the wet towel makes you cold. The weight of it makes you slow. After a few days you start to smell old and nothing seems like a very good idea.

4. Puberty

Shame is sticky and the antidote to transformation.

5. Losing my virginity

Shame tells you to hide, unfortunately the tools it gives you for hiding promote shame on shame. Shameless self promotion.

6. Leaving school

When you would rather not be seen it is preferable to hide in anything you can find.

7. Leaving home

8. Getting a job

9. My father dying

When my father died I did not notice. This is not because I was not paying attention exactly, in fact I paid so much attention, maybe too much. Nursing him from when I was 13 to 22. But something can become normal, like someone being ill, like thinking someone won’t really die. So I slept on his hospital floor for months. I swabbed his throat with little pink sponges. I knew the nurses names. He died. I wanted to stay on the floor. I wasn’t ready not to have a father. I wore his clothes. I didn’t cry. I did not become fatherless. I just became personless.

10. Moving to America

11. Being hospitalized for anorexia

12. Getting married Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health, Surviving

Mother And Daughter: An (In)Complete History of (Almost) Suicide

March 12, 2017

CW: This piece discusses suicide and suicidal ideation.

By Amy Buchanan

One of my earliest memories is this: Sitting in the passenger seat of an old, beat-up blue Volkswagen, tracing a raindrop with my finger as it slides down the window and swallows up other raindrops along the way. My bare feet don’t yet touch the floor. I’m barely tall enough to see the gray world outside. My pajamas are twisted up, cutting a red line into my neck. My mother’s boyfriend opens the door and ponderously shoves a wastebasket full of my socks into the back seat. He is a bear of a man; I adore him, but he can be scary. This morning he is scary. Just sitting next to him brings anxious tears to my eyes.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“I’m taking you to some people. You’re going to live with them now.” He forces the car in gear, and we begin to drive away.

“Where is my mom?” I cry, a keening sound too big for my small body.

“Who the hell knows. Probably going to the ocean to drown,” he looks at me. “She doesn’t want you anymore. Now shut it.” Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, Tough Conversations

Conversations On Baseball, Zombies, and Death

November 5, 2016

TW: This essay discusses suicide.

By Meg Weber

My daughter was six years old the first time she asked me for details about Melissa’s death. She knew Melissa had been my best friend, that she had died, and that I missed her. I had staunchly avoided any other details.

One morning, just over a year ago, Kai finally voiced her questions. “Why did she die? Did she get sick? Did she want her bones to be a skeleton?” Although we’d talked about scattering Melissa’s ashes, I had purposefully skipped over describing how bodies become ashes.

I hadn’t explained how Melissa died, mainly because walking in the forest on a clear blue sky day is something I want Kai to be excited about, not scared of. I want her to love trees, not fear them. But the day she finally asked her litany of questions, I told her the truth. Melissa had been hiking in a forest and a big part of a tree broke off and fell on her. “Momo, did her blood come out? Momo, why didn’t she just run really fast to get away from the tree? That’s what I would have done.” Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Surviving

The Shivers Take me Hard

June 26, 2016

TW: This essay discusses suicide and suicidal ideation.

By Brenda Taulbee

It is February and 2am and I am standing in the Holiday gas station, you know, the one on the corner of Higgins? I slipped I say into the telephone that Kelly, the late night attendant, hesitantly handed me. My cell phone is a lump of useless in my soggy pocket. Kelly has long, beautiful hair that he keeps pulled back. He likes microbrews and taking his mother to craft shows. We’ve chatted the handful of times I’ve stumbled in just before bar hour to pick up a 30-rack of cheap beer. Something to fuel the after party and take the edge off morning.

Can you come get me? I ask the phone and my girlfriend on the other end of it. The homeless man who saved my life nervously peruses the candy bar rack. Kelly eyeballs him from behind blocky glasses. If it weren’t for me he’d have run him out already. His long fingered hands splay across the glass case of Scratch ‘Em and lottery tickets like two fat spiders. On the other side of the receiver her voice is forever ago. I didn’t think I was trying to kill myself that night, but I guess that’s the story. The thing and the thing beneath it. The thing being a river, and me quickly becoming the thing beneath it. The stepping itself was easy. One second ground beneath me, the next nothing. All that dark water sucking eager at my heavy winter clothes. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health

Small Deaths and Small Magic

March 28, 2016

Trigger warning: This essay discusses suicidal ideation.

By Summer Krafft

He stood there, the oddness of a boy turned statue, at the end of the hallway. The light filtering through the window outlined his silhouette as he stared through the glass. It was the only window in the place.

Sometimes I say I don’t remember getting there, but it’s not true. What is true is that sometimes I cannot bear to tell it. The doctors said what they could to make it plain: suicidal ideations. They wanted it to seem as if I could explain my being there in two words, as if it were simple.

I think a better way of saying it is that I dreamt of making a blood masterpiece with the sharp kiss of knives against my snow skin. Which is another way of saying I already knew how to dry-swallow a handful of little chemical marbles. Which is another way of saying I was not afraid of drowning; it seemed just like the returning to a before-birth, to a time of not being.

I guess that’s how I got there, to Heritage Oaks Adolescent Psychiatric Facility. The place with the stark white walls and impossibly long hallway lined with doorways –no actual doors– two patients inside each of them, a large window overlooking a dumpster at the end. The place that smelled of Lysol, Jello, unwashed teens, and dried blood. The place where there was always someone crying or screaming or begging to go home, echoing like childhood lost. A place where I ended and began.

My memory of this place is anchored in the people: Maddy, who was fifteen and hospitalized there for her fourth suicide attempt. Elaine, the biggest and meanest twelve-year-old I’ve ever seen who just kept singing ‘This is the Song that Never Ends.” Xenia, who was both the prettiest and the saddest of all of us, who would sneak into the room of the boy who liked to punch holes in the walls. Stacey, my roommate, who stared at me while I tried to sleep and did not speak and had the habit of ripping off her bra and flinging it across the room when she got upset. Jason, who was there because his mother thought he was going to kill his sister. When I asked him if she was right, he gritted his teeth, jaw flexing like a small murder, averted his eyes, and shook his head no. I couldn’t tell if he was about to cry. I didn’t have the energy to be scared of him. I was there for my own momentum hurling me towards death. I was there because no one who loved me could trust me to be alone with my own hands. Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts, Young Voices

Masquerades

February 24, 2016

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GirlPowerYouAreEnough and on Facebook here. Please share this essay as I feel it is tremendously important that we begin to shatter the stigma associated with mental illness and depression. Tweet, FB it, send to a friend, Instagram it. Whatever you can do. We need to break the silence.

Trigger warning: self harm and suicidal ideation.

By Anonymous

“It isn’t true that there’s a community of light, a bonfire of the world.
Everyone carries his own, his lonely own. My light is out. There’s nothing blacker than a wick.”
–The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck

On December 13^th, I blew out 24 candles with one simple wish—to die. It was the first time that I forced myself out of bed in days, as well as the first day in an even longer time that I ate. I know that people have it worse than I do. I know that my life appears “perfect” from the outside. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t make my circumstances any less significant. It doesn’t change the nights spent researching how to disappear. It also didn’t stop me from fantasizing about ending my life incessantly, even on my birthday. Even the most colorful candles couldn’t compete with the all-consuming darkness. How quickly the fire diminishes.

Depression is not poetic. Depression is not a cry for attention, nor is it a perquisite to creativity. Rather, it is Sylvia Plath had it wrong when she wrote, “Dying is an art, like everything else.” There is no art to feeling desperate enough to end your own life. The real art is endurance; it’s getting out of bed; it’s rummaging up the strength to make it through the day.

This year contained far too many hospital bracelets—too much bleach, too much time spent laying on train tracks in the middle of the night and jumping in front of oncoming traffic. As I type these empty words, I hospital bracelet remains tightly wrapped around my wrist; this particular fashion accessory was placed around my wrist the day after my birthday. I consider it my present to myself, a last resort of sorts. I made a promise to myself that if I walk through these doors feeling the same way that I felt when I came in that I will indefinitely end my own life.

Here, life is sterile. Here, you have to submit a request through your doctor to use saline solution. Here, the windows are shielded with metal. The pink University of New Hampshire blanket on bed is the only hint of color that surrounds me. The doors are permanently. Days flow together like words on a page. This cocoon of fluorescent lights and fifteen-minute checks transports us to a world that is as far away from reality as possible.

*******

Two weeks later and they tell me that I can’t go home. They call this the Short Term Unit, as though one is expected to transform from acutely at risk to “safe” in the blink of an eye. I pretend that I am better—I pretend that I don’t still salivate at the sight of sharp objects or abandoned rooftops. I smile at the doctor who has grown tired of the empty words that flow from my mouth. This purgatory is not my own.

Half of the time I long to be fierce, I long to wake up every day with the vitality and life that you swore that you’d permanently possess. The other half of the time, I’m too tired to get out of bed. I’m too paralyzed with fear to walk across the room. Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months. I remember the days when I lived off of diet coke and I coddle those memories not for the sake of any outward appearance, but because those were the times when my life had a purpose. Direction. Something.

They look in from the outside and say, “you have so much to live for.” I promise that if I hear those words ever again, I’ll implode. No one teaches you that having everything is dangerously close to having nothing. No degree or G.P.A. or jean size will save me from myself. No amount of medications or shock treatments will lull the daymares of reality.

Everyday is a mental hospital masquerade, a tender seroquel-klonopin-trazadone whirlwind of unspoken words and hidden horror shows.

*******

Two months later I see that I spent June through February and back again fantasying about what life might be like without me in it and so much of that time, I realize now, was a life without me in it, anyway. It was a silent funeral for the unalive, a celebration of unbirthing. When Lux Aeterna becomes your anthem and the hospital becomes your home, you start to wonder what life was like before all of this.

When reading and writing is all together too foreign, you start to wonder if you even really exist. But it’s always right when all your faculties seem amiss that they finally start returning to you—you’re finally able to open a book, and it’s probably the same day that you’re finally able to open a blind.

The day that things shatter, the day the silence breaks, leaves your ears ringing. Six months later you are back in space and you realize what you thought was a home was a toxic incubator, what you thought was your anthem was a misplaced swansong. The air is so much colder than you remember it, but when you’re allowed to breathe it in again you do so in fierce, greedy gulps, not knowing how much of life is yours for the taking and how much you’ll be able to save for tomorrow.

You wish that you could swallow the sea, numb your limbs, and taste the salt. When there is no place left to wander, you descend to your final destination. Coming home happens in small, unsteady steps. First, it’s convincing gravity to be on your side. This takes a while. They’ll tell you about grounding as though you were meant to find paradise amidst the earth’s soil. Then, it’s convincing yourself to stay there. This takes an eternity. But you laugh, knowing now that you always had the time.

March 13 NYC! A 90 minute class for women, girls and non-gender conforming folks (we encourage teens 16 and up) and all levels that will combine flow yoga, meditation, empowerment exercises, connection and maybe, just maybe, a dance party. This will be a class to remind you that you are enough and that you are a badass. It will be fun and empowering and you need no yoga experience: just be a human being. Let’s get into our bodies and move! Be warned: This will be more than just a basic asana class. It will be a soul-shifting, eye-opening, life-changing experience. Come see why Jen Pastiloff travels around the world and sells out every workshop she does in every city. This will be her last class before she has her baby so sign up soon. Follow her on instagram at @jenpastiloff and @girlpoweryouareenough.
Jen is also doing her signature Manifestation workshop in NY at Pure Yoga Saturday March 5th which you can sign up for here as well (click pic.)

Join Jen Pastiloff in Tuscany Sep 17-24, 2016. There are 5 spaces left. This will be her only international retreat in 2016 and is her favorite retreat of the year. Email barbara@jenniferpastiloff.com asap. More info here. Must email first to sign up.